Good for a laugh – unless you are a feminist.

I came across this video in the Spectator. It is 30 minutes, so those of limited attention spans (e.g. gadflies) may not have the perseverance to see it all the way through. I must admit I had never heard of either individual, but for today at least Jordan Peterson is my new personal hero.

Like this:

6 thoughts on “Good for a laugh – unless you are a feminist.”

I saw this as well. To say that Cathy Newman got the worst of the encounter is an understatement. By the end of the interview I had come to the realisation that she is actually quite stupid. I first became aware of Jordan Peterson early last year year when he was interviewed by Mark Steyn ( https://youtu.be/p4obxH2vSms ) I thought then that he was a person of principle and courage. He has a Youtube channel ( https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideos ) and I’ll get around to watching some of his talks when time allows.

Hi Jazz. ” I had come to the realisation that she is actually quite stupid.” I think that is a characteristic shared by many such harridans who somehow believe they have the intellectual upper hand simply because they are loud and abusive, and support an extreme point of view. To be fair, many male broadcasters are guilty of that sort of behaviour as well.

The level of hypocrisy attached to the so-called pay gap debate is mind blowing.

Clearly I do not have a limited attention span – I listened to the conversation from start to end.

And obviously I am not a feminist – since I found much of what he had to say pretty self-evident. This is the way the world is – deal with it.

But then, I didn’t find her a ‘harridan’… or loud, abusive or even particularly stupid. Somewhat idealistic- yes. But I don’t actually have a problem with that. If everyone thought the world as it is was O.K. we’d still be living in caves…

My biggest problem was the way she moved so quickly from any point that she had no answer for… Not a well prepared interview.

Cathy may be clever and well educated but none the less she’s a bit dim. She should have taken Prof Peterson’s measure and interviewed him in a calm and rational manner.
Her job ( I think ) is to interview people for the benefit of the viewer so that they can better understand what the person is about. In this case I think we all understood what Prof Peterson, but that was little thanks to Ms Newman. Unfortunately she’s not alone in regarding interviews as a contest to show how clever she is and how awful the interviewee is. Unless of course the latter is a fully paid up member of the liberal elite.

Jazz: That isn’t uncommon in academia these days. Two things went tragically wrong in the last few decades. The first is that they live in echo chambers. They rarely, if ever, hear dissenting opinions so they assume that their views are normal and all others are deviant. When they hear “about” dissenting opinions, it’s usually as a straw man. The second thing that has gone wrong is overspecialisation. When reading books written by scholars in the late 1950s to early ’60s, it’s fairly obvious that they had a broad education and could make relevant comparisons with some facility. For example, comparing and contrasting court ritual in Ming and Qing China to that of Versailles. It wasn’t exactly the same, nor was it claimed to be, but for those unfamiliar with either Chinese or French history, it makes it more understandable. In recent decades, academics have rarely been able to break out of their narrow interests. When I was an undergraduate, there were professors who could tell you anything you needed and/or wanted to know about women in France in the 18th century or folk beliefs in 16th century Bohemia, but if you asked them even a basic question about the Raj or Imperial Germany, they’d be stupefied. That overspecialisation has been made worse by the abandonment of objectivity and dialectical reasoning.

‘Spectator’ subscriber myself so had been alerted to the interview. By chance, I had also heard JP being interviewed on Radio 5 Live by somebody who had gone down the same road as Cathy. Tried to belittle and pigeonhole him as misogynistic, marginally racist, and probably possessing other undesirable non-PC traits.

In due course, and presumably after thinking about what JP had actually said, the interviewer tweeted him to thank him for his input. That, in my opinion, is a fairly major result, BBC-wise.

Anyhow, I have downloaded the book that he was promoting – ’12 Rules for Life’. Ploughing through it as time permits. I have yet to find fault with any of his propositions.